The verdict is in.
Chattanooga's lawyers have litigated themselves into the top average income bracket in the U.S. legal system, according to a study conducted by the American Bar Association.
Scenic City barristers are the 10th highest-paid in the nation, beating venues such as Chicago, Philadelphia and Atlanta, the ABA said.
"That is amazing," said Hugh Sharber, a member of Miller & Martin, one of Chattanooga's largest and most successful firms.
Sharber, along with others, credited Chattanooga's growing status as a regional business center with the rising demand for legal minds, and blamed the tight supply of counsel on the absence of a local law school.
Constraint on supply
The evidence, based on a three-year examination that ended in 2009, shows the average annual income for a Chattanooga-area lawyer to be $148,350, coming in just below Washington D.C., Los Angeles and New York, where the mean wage is at $166,130, but the cost of living is higher.
The highest-paid litigators live in Silicon Valley, where they earn about $192,020.
The discovery of Chattanooga as a legal hot spot came in spite of the fact that the city has only 10 local publicly traded companies and an overall average income that is 15 percent less than the U.S. average.
Its lack of a law school may a driving factor behind the high demand for solicitors, Sharber said.
"Some lawyers out of law schools in other cities end up practicing in that city. We don't happen to have one here," he said. "On a supply and demand basis, there is more supply there."
The lack of a law school gives Chattanooga firms the ability to pick and choose their fellow jurists for specialized tasks, the type of work that generally yields higher fees, said Sam Elliott, president of the Tennessee Bar Association.
"Sometimes people come in because they have a skill that a law firm needs, a specialist in tax work or medical malpractice," Elliott said.
Dana Perry, managing partner for Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel, added that companies that have to compete overseas, like the area's manufacturing sector, need to hire "the very best lawyers in the country," hence the higher salaries.
Insurers Unum and BlueCross BlueShield also keep a large stable of lawyers on payroll, although both declined to comment on either the number of legal practitioners they employ.
City is growing area
Though the ABA study polled about 710 of its members in studying the case, Elliott said that the area, which includes Catoosa County, Ga., has closer to 1,200 attorneys, some of whom aren't ABA members.
As it turns out, paying ABA dues can get expensive for divorce attorneys and public defenders, and the association uses dues to pursue political causes that not all lawyers support, he said.
So some of them may not have been counted.
"The guys who are ABA members are more likely to make higher rates of money," he said.
The ABA Journal's Rachel Zahorsky, who penned Chattanooga's write-up for a section called "10 Surprising Legal Markets," wrote that a factor in the skewed salaries could be the advent of the income partner, a law firm hierarchy trend common in many big-city firms.
A large number of partners, she wrote, have been pushed into salaried positions by the recession, but the growth in the Chattanooga area has prevented layoffs of the scale experienced in other cities.
And if the area weren't growing, Chattanooga's central location allows lawyers to live in Chattanooga, and commute when necessary to the surrounding metro areas, said Alan Easterly, member at Leitner, Williams, Dooley & Napolitan.
"It's nothing to be able to branch out from Chattanooga and go down to Atlanta, Nashville, Knoxville or spread out into Middle and West Tennessee," Easterly said. "You can hit three major metro areas in two hours."